


Seven Flowers

by ravenbringslight



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Existential Musings, First Kiss, Flowers, Fluff, M/M, Midsummer, Sibling Incest, Underage Drinking, summer boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24325117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenbringslight/pseuds/ravenbringslight
Summary: on Midsummer night, if you collect seven wildflowers and put them under your pillow, you'll dream of your true love
Relationships: Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 351
Collections: Boys of Summer





	Seven Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> The tradition of putting seven flowers under your pillow on Midsummer night is from [traditional Swedish Midsummer celebrations](https://sweden.se/culture-traditions/midsummer/). I did a bunch of reading about other Swedish Midsummer traditions as well and tried to incorporate them into Frigga's side of the family, who are Swedish in this story. If I've gotten anything wrong let me know!
> 
> ✨🌸 an absolutely lovely portrait of Loki by darklittlestory [here](https://twitter.com/darklittlestory/status/1265011267464552451?s=19)! 🌸✨

Thor and Loki graduate high school together in early June. Loki doesn’t quite know how to feel about it. He walks across the stage in a cap and gown that he’s going to hand right back afterwards, feeling like an actor in a play who’s never even seen the script. In a reversal of the way the world usually works, he goes before Thor. L comes before T in the alphabet.

“How many of these people do you think will be blackout drunk by 10 pm?” Loki mutters to Thor as they take their seats again.

“Almost all of them. Including the parents.”

Loki hides his smile with his new diploma.

The ceremony drags for ages. Loki is feeling downright morbid by the end of it. All these faces that he’s seen every weekday of his life for the last four years are about to scatter and he’ll likely never see any of them again. He doesn’t care about any of the people specifically, it’s just that the whole idea that you can spend so much of your life on something that is, at the end, essentially meaningless leaves him full of a vague sort of existential dread.

Thor shifts next to him and scratches his nose. Loki pushes his leg against his brother’s, wanting the physical contact to anchor him. Thor pushes back, and gives him a little elbow nudge too, and Loki thinks, Well at least this means something.

*

With school finally over, both Thor and Loki sleep the sleep of the perpetually unrested for the next week.

The house has only two bedrooms, so Odin and Frigga share one and the brothers share the other, one bed against each wall. Years ago in a fit of preteen rage Loki put a duct tape line down the center of the room and forbade Thor or any of his possessions to cross it. It’s a boundary that Thor more or less still respects, but Loki only actually enforces it irregularly, when the mood strikes.

Frigga pays the line no mind at all. If they sleep in past noon (which they do most days) she marches straight down it to the window between their beds and throws the blackout curtains open, making them hiss like vampires in the midday sun. Then she collects their dirty laundry (“as an act of self-preservation for my nose,” she says) and tells them they’re not allowed downstairs until they shower.

Thor stops shaving his face and by the end of the week he has a full blown beard.

Loki diligently shaves the tiny patch of stubble on his chin and chases down the stragglers on his cheeks and knows that he’ll never be able to do the same, but the knowing doesn’t bother him. He has a hate-hate relationship going on with any hair on his body that isn’t his scalp, eyelashes, or eyebrows, and the eyebrows are on thin ice.

He likes Thor’s beard though. It’s rugged. It makes him look like a _man_. He’s only a few months older than Loki but now he can pass for a few years older than him, and it feels like a preview of the adulthood that they were promised now that they’re officially Not In High School Anymore. Loki wants to rub his face in it. He’ll never have one of his own, he reasons. It’s only natural to be curious.

One Friday morning, Loki is blow drying his hair and sweating from the heat of it while Thor brushes his teeth and looks at him in the mirror.

“Why do you bother?” Thor says. “Just put it up.” He gestures to the messy golden pile on top of his own head to say, See, like this.

“Gives me a headache.”

“Then cut it.”

“Why don’t I cut off yours instead?”

Thor flicks him with toothpaste and Loki turns the blow dryer on his face and makes him yelp. The truth is that at least when his hair is long he can blow dry it straight. When it’s short it all curls up on top of his head and makes him look like a frosted cupcake, which is about the least sexy thing he can think of.

He doesn’t say that though, because then Thor will ask him who he wants to be sexy for. Loki only has one answer but it’s not one that makes any sense, even to him.

Loki hates summer. Besides the underlayer of his hair sweating through and starting to curl despite his best efforts, there’s the whole “too hot to wear long sleeves and pants” thing, and honestly Loki would rather become a hermit than let anyone see his bare arms and legs. Thor’s the exception to that, like Thor is the exception to almost everything.

Today Loki decides to sweat it out in black skinny jeans with a black t-shirt and a thin soft black button-up shirt, unbuttoned, with the sleeves rolled up to mid forearm. Thor is spilling out of a tank top that would probably be snug on Loki and is obscene on Thor, and he has on tiny running shorts that show off his sun-kissed legs up to his asscheeks. He’s going to go _running_ like that, the maniac. Loki wonders how many people’s days he makes when he runs by them looking like he sprang to life from the myths he’s named after.

Frigga is in the kitchen when they tromp downstairs.

“11AM! A new record!” she says.

“Bye mom,” Thor says and kisses her on the cheek before he lets the screen door bang shut behind him, already running by the time he reaches the bottom step.

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Loki says. “To have that much energy. I’m barely awake.”

“Iced coffee in the refrigerator,” Frigga says to Loki. “I tried something I found on pinterest. A lavender latte?”

“Still on a flower kick?” Loki snags the coffee from the fridge door and takes a gulp. It’s cold and just a little sweet with a floral perfume that lingers pleasantly.

“Today is Midsummer!” Frigga says. “I might not carry on all the traditions I grew up with, but flowers are non-negotiable. Speaking of which, you both _will_ be home tonight, yes? I’ve got a lovely meal planned.”

“And flower crowns and a maypole,” Loki says. “We’ll dance and sing under the moonlight—”

Frigga plucks the coffee from his hand and Loki makes a noise of mock affront.

“I’m making Mormor’s strawberry cake,” Frigga says.

Loki’s stomach gives an appreciative rumble. Frigga’s mother’s strawberry cake is the stuff of legend, and they only get to eat it once a year.

“Where else would we be?” Loki says.

*

They have a few old photo albums from the 80s and 90s before Frigga met Odin, where she was a smiling blonde girl in Sweden. Loki likes to look through them sometimes. He imagines his mom being his age, what her life was like, how it was the same as his, how it was different. She brought Thor and Loki to visit her hometown twice, and Loki loved it both times. He often wishes that he could have grown up there instead of the US. The photos fill him with nostalgia for something he’s never experienced.

Loki takes his coffee to the den and pulls out one of the albums and sits on the floor with it. 

He’s looking for his favorite photo. It’s a picture that Uncle Frey took of Frigga at Midsummer, outside in a white dress with a crown of yellow flowers and a cascading rainbow of ribbons down her back, smiling back at the camera, wide and joyful. It’s a smile Loki’s never seen on her in real life, and he wonders what happened to it—if it was him and Thor that made it disappear, or Odin, or maybe just that that’s what happens to smiles over time; they fade into more sustainable versions of themselves, less costly to the smiler.

Loki finds the page, and there’s Frigga with the flowers in her hair. Loki traces her mouth with his finger. Thor has this same smile. If it ever fades Loki will know that the world is just as rotten as he’s always feared, that it could dim something as bright as his brother. He touches his own mouth and wishes that he could have something of his mother and brother in his face, though he knows it’s impossible.

There’s Mormor’s strawberry cake on a picnic table in the next photo, same as it’s always been, though Mormor in the picture is the same age Frigga is now. He remembers how Mormor used to brush his hair when he was little and tell him stories in her sweetly rounded accent.

He takes a sip of his coffee and the lavender makes him think of one story in particular. A Midsummer tradition, where young would-be lovers in search of a partner collect seven flowers and put them under their pillow, and that night they’ll dream of their true love.

_(“Like, seven dandelions, Mormor?” Loki asked, and she chucked and smoothed his hair while he fidgeted on her lap. “No no, love. All different flowers. They all have to work together to tell you their secrets. Seven dandelions will only tell you the same thing seven times. You might only dream of your love’s eyebrow, or their big toe. What good would that be?”)_

It’s a little bit silly and romantic, and just the kind of thing that tickles Loki’s fancy but that he would never ever admit to.

Well, no one has to know, do they?

Thor bangs back into the house and thunders up the stairs to take a shower. Loki goes back through the kitchen where Frigga is chopping strawberries and out into the backyard, and surveys the wildflower situation. Buttercup, violet, clover, and dandelion he finds immediately and picks one of each. That’s four. He needs three more. He feels a little ridiculous with the stems clutched in his hand like a toddler’s bouquet, but he hunts around the side of the house and finds a little white daisy-looking flower (he googles it later and thinks it’s called fleabane), and then, braving the front yard and ready to toss the flowers the instant that anyone sees him, he finds two more by the mailbox, a lacy white one with one red petal in the middle (queen anne’s lace) and a pretty purple one (chicory. thanks, google).

He gets them upstairs and realizes belatedly that they’ll never last until bedtime, and so he runs down to the kitchen again for a cup of water and then shoves them under his bed, none too soon, because Thor comes in ten seconds later with a towel around his waist shedding water like a dog.

“Stay on your side,” Loki snaps. “Why can’t you dry off with a towel in the shower like a normal person—?”

“I like to drip dry,” Thor says. “Shit. All my shirts are dirty. Can I borrow one?”

Loki thinks that must be impossible with how often their mom does laundry, but he tosses Thor his biggest band shirt, which stretches tight across Thor’s chest when he pulls it on and makes Loki swallow and look away.

“Mom’s making Mormor’s strawberry cake tonight,” Loki says.

Thor groans. “Oh my god, I love that cake.”

“She’s probably going to try to put flowers in your hair.”

“Cake _and_ flower crowns? I love Midsummer.”

“You have the soul of a small girl trapped in the body of a large muscley—” Loki almost says _man_ , which somehow feels too weird to say, but they’re not boys anymore, not really, so after a split second pause he comes up with, “guy.”

“Thank you,” Thor says cheerfully. “On both counts.”

*

A few times when the brothers were younger, Frigga had a big cookout for Midsummer and invited the whole block. Loki has memories of giant piles of stinky pickled herring, of rooting through coolers of melting ice to find soda that wasn’t diet, of running through the sprinkler yelling with Thor and the other kids from the block who they only ever played with in the summer. 

This year it’s just the four of them.

Frigga convinces Loki to help her cut fruit, and the two of them make a beautiful platter with spirals of overlapping slices of mango, pineapple, and honeydew, filling in the gaps with berries. Thor hangs around and steals as many pieces as make it onto the platter, until Frigga starts batting his hands away and threatens to make him put it together himself. It goes in the fridge next to the gravadlax and the herby potato salad that Frigga already made.

“Shoo,” Frigga tells them. “It’s time for schnapps and cake decorating. Moms only.”

Thor laughs. “You’re the only mom here.”

Frigga winks. “Oh goody, more schnapps for me.”

Thor grabs two seltzers from the fridge and hands one to Loki.

“It’s too hot. Wanna go outside?”

“The outside is why it’s hot.”

“But we can sit in the shade.”

Loki doesn’t want to be outside, but he lets Thor drag him anyway. They sit on the patio and put music on Loki’s phone and watch videos on Thor’s until they get bored. It hits Loki at some point as they’re sitting there, shoulder to shoulder, that this simple togetherness they have is almost over. Thor’s been right here next to him every day of his life, and in two months he won’t be, just like that.

It makes Loki’s stomach feel strange, and he finds himself pressing his cheek to his brother’s shoulder. He thinks of the flowers under his bed.

*

When Odin gets home from work, Frigga sets Thor to work grilling lamb chops. Odin builds a fire in the firepit, then disappears into the house and comes out with a cold glistening six-pack of beer.

“You can each have one,” Odin tells them, and Thor salutes him with the grill tongs.

Frigga cuts two roses off of one of her bushes and takes the thorns off. She sticks one into Thor’s messy bun. The other she tries to tuck behind Loki’s ear, but Loki intercepts it and tucks the stem into his pocket instead. She wrinkles her nose at him and calls him a killjoy.

When the chops are done they all tuck into the spread, and the strange feeling Loki had earlier recedes. Frigga is tipsy, which makes her affectionate and giggly, and her warmth makes even Odin’s gruff exterior crack. She ends up recounting ridiculous antics from other Midsummers when she was small—the time she got chased by a flock of angry geese, the time Frey accidentally dropped a frog he’d found onto their aunt’s plate—and then funny incidents from when Thor and Loki were little. They’re all familiar stories, well worn and well loved, and Odin and Thor and Loki all interject at the appropriate points, until all of them are laughing and full and the mosquitoes are coming out in the rapidly darkening dusk.

“Who’s ready for cake?” Frigga says.

“Me,” Thor and Loki chorus together, and then Loki adds, “But inside, I’m already getting eaten alive.”

When they stand up, Loki’s rose flutters to the ground. He picks it up, then after a second’s hesitation he snags Thor and sticks it into his hair alongside the other one. Thor grins and bats his eyelashes and Loki smacks him in the arm.

The cake is just as delicious as it always is, and after they’ve licked their plates clean Frigga pulls out four shot glasses and lines them up and fills them with the last of the schnapps.

“For good luck,” Frigga says with a wink.

They tip their glasses back and the alcohol burns Loki’s throat and makes him cough.

Frigga looks around the kitchen and sighs dramatically. “If everyone just pretends they can’t see the dishes I won’t make anyone clean them until tomorrow.”

“What dishes? I don’t see any dishes,” Thor says.

“Good boy.”

Frigga tells them to get out of there already, and Loki starts to head upstairs, Thor hot on his heels. Just to be annoying, Loki stops in the middle of the stairs and makes Thor run into his back, and when he laughs Thor smacks him on the butt. Thor keeps poking him in the right buttcheek all the way up the stairs and into their bedroom.

One beer and one shot over the course of a few hours isn’t enough to make Loki drunk, or even that tipsy, but he does feel the alcohol a little. It makes him feel restless, like there’s something he needs to be doing, but also sleepy-limbed.

“It’s too early to sleep,” Loki complains. 

“Your laptop is right there.”

Loki is definitely whining now. “Thorrr. Entertain me.”

“I could go get the other bottle of schnapps that Mom thinks she hid.”

“Yes. Also chips. And the rest of the cake.”

“She’ll kill us if that cake is gone tomorrow.”

“She’ll kill us if the schnapps is gone too. At least let’s make it a good death.”

Thor laughs. “I’m going to blame it all on you.”

They stay up until 2AM eating and drinking (not a lot, just enough to get a nice buzz) and binging Netflix on Loki’s laptop, squished together on Loki’s bed, the duct tape boundary forgotten for the night. Every time they shift, Loki gets a waft of the roses still in Thor’s hair. Thor rests his hand on Loki’s knee and strokes it with his thumb absently and Loki wonders if he even knows he’s doing it. Loki is acutely aware. It’s one of those things that’s unfair, that Thor is so open and careless with his affections that he doesn’t even think about them, or think about what they might mean to someone like Loki who’s as stingy with his own as Thor is generous.

Does he even notice, Loki wonders, that I never let anyone else touch me at all?

It’s making his stomach veer into strange territory again, and he’s glad when the episode they’re watching ends and he can stretch and tell Thor he wants to go to bed.

Thor gets up to pee and Loki checks under his bed for the wildflowers. They’re still there, a little limp but fine, and he shakes them off and stuffs them under his pillow. He feels guilty for some reason. He really shouldn’t. It’s not like Thor would make fun of him, or at least if he did it would be good-natured. It feels like a secret, though. A bit of solstice magic, a glimpse into a future that might be, for Loki and Loki only.

You, he thinks to himself, are a very silly drunk.

Thor comes back and turns the lights out and they settle into their separate beds.

Violet, buttercup, clover, dandelion, fleabane, chicory, queen anne’s lace, Loki repeats to himself. Will you tell me the same thing seven times?

He looks over in Thor’s direction in the dark, and falls asleep.

*

Loki dreams of their house, only bigger, with more rooms than any one house can contain. Something is looking for him. He goes from room to room trying to stay ahead of it. There’s also someone just ahead of him, and he knows, in that dreamtime way of knowing, that if he could just catch them that he’d be safe from the thing that’s chasing him. All he needs is for the person to stop for a second and wait for him to catch up. He starts running, throwing doors open. He wants to yell for the person to wait, but his voice won’t work. The thing chasing him is getting faster too. He sees the person’s back ahead of him, broad-shouldered, and Loki reaches out, grabs their shoulder, goes to yank them around, and—

His eyes come open with a start, his heart hammering against his ribs. The first thing he sees is Thor’s face, which breaks into a sleepy smile.

“G’morning,” Thor says. He’s on his stomach facing Loki’s side of the room, hair rumpled and littered with crushed rose petals.

There you are, Loki thinks. I’ve been looking for you all night.

They both have long enough arms that if they stretch them out they can touch right about where the duct tape line is. Loki holds his arm out. Thor stretches his arm out too and they hook fingers for a second.

“You look sad,” Thor says.

“It’s nothing.”

Thor gets up, and he’s only wearing underwear, but he doesn’t get dressed, just climbs into Loki’s bed next to him. There’s not really enough room for them both to lay on their backs, so he lies on his side with his mouth on Loki’s shoulder.

Unfair.

“ _It’s nothing_ means it’s not nothing,” Thor says.

“It’s too early. We should go back to sleep.”

“It’s not too early. Tell me.”

Loki sighs and tries to talk away from Thor’s face so he doesn’t kill him with morning breath.

“I don’t know, I just…” His stomach does the thing. “We’re going to college in two months, you know? And, like...This. We’re not going to have this anymore. Everything is going to be different.”

Thor is quiet for a second. “Different doesn’t have to mean bad.”

“I know, but…” Loki struggles to articulate it. “It’s just...I feel like I’ve just been dreaming my life up until now and I didn’t realize I was dreaming until we graduated. And now suddenly I have to wake up, and no matter how nice the dream was or how much I want to dream it again, even if I go back to sleep it won’t be the same. And...it’s always going to be like that. Life, I mean. Everything is always going to change. And it just… really hit me the last couple of days. I don’t know.”

Thor makes a noise and opens his mouth to talk, but Loki’s on a roll now and he keeps going.

“And then I think about going to college, and how the only reason anyone even goes to college is so they can get a job, so I think about what kind of job I can possibly get, and I think about Dad going to work every single day of his life doing something he doesn’t give a shit about just to get enough money to keep this house and pay bills and feed us and how fucking depressing that is to even contemplate. Like. Is that it? Is that life? Why exist at all? And I just…”

Thor takes Loki’s hand and laces their fingers together and just holds it.

“It’s stupid to have a mid-life crisis at eighteen isn’t it?” Loki says. He holds Thor’s hand tightly back.

Thor kisses his shoulder and Loki closes his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking a lot of the same kinds of things,” Thor says. “Part of me wants to not even go to college. But then I think that that will limit the things I can do, probably, which I don’t want either. But four years seems like such a long time. And…”

And Loki thinks, Maybe this is what was chasing me last night.

And Loki thinks, But Thor was going to save me.

It’s always been the two of them, since they were newborns brought home from the hospital together, one of them Frigga’s son by birth and the other her son by choice. Loki’s never really been capable of dividing and spreading his love around the way that other people are, and in retrospect he chose to give all of it to Thor before he even knew he was making the choice. He can’t even be sorry for it. There isn’t anyone else he would rather love.

“And I miss you already,” Loki says softly.

Thor’s voice is almost a whisper. “Yeah.”

Thor kisses his shoulder again, and Loki finally lets himself think the thing he’s only ever let himself think about sideways, which is that he wishes that Thor would lean up and kiss him on the mouth.

It’s shocking. It feels like people should be bursting into the room to arrest him for even letting the thought happen. But no one bursts in, and Thor is still holding his hand and still has his lips pressed against his shoulder.

I want Thor to kiss me, Loki thinks again. It’s a relief, in a way, to finally let himself admit it. To lie here peacefully with it. The thought isn’t going anywhere, and no one can take it from him. I want Thor to kiss me. He almost smiles.

Loki realizes after a long silence that Thor’s fallen back asleep. He picks his phone up. It’s only 8. He closes his eyes and goes back to sleep too.

*

This time, with the flowers still under his pillow, and his brother’s body pressed hot against his side, Loki dreams of Thor. For real.

It’s a mundane dream. They’re just walking and holding hands. It’s lovely.

Loki wakes up and Thor has put his arm around him in his sleep, and his hand is resting so that his thumb is on Loki’s nipple. Loki takes a deep breath. Just that simple touch on an area usually reserved as off-limits for fraternal affection is enough to make his dick take interest.

Go away, he tells it. You’re not allowed to be here.

He’s managed to get it back down to half mast by the time Thor stirs, except that Thor does that sleepy little noise that he makes when he wakes up, and instead of taking his arm away he tightens it around Loki for a second, and Loki makes a noise too because his stupid dick just sprang instantly to life again.

Thor just sleepy hums again and keeps hugging him and sticks his arm up under the pillow to prop his head up a little and—

“What’s this?” Thor says, and he’s going up on his elbow and pulling out Loki’s flowers.

“Nothing,” Loki says. He’s hot all over with embarrassment and he tries to roll over and cross his legs. Hopefully Thor hasn’t noticed his hard-on.

“I thought you thought Midsummer traditions were corny,” Thor says.

“They are.”

Loki expects a little good-natured ribbing, but instead Thor is quiet for a second, then says, seriously, “Want to know who I dreamed about?”

Loki doesn’t. He curls up into a ball, nearly forcing Thor off the edge of the bed.

“Get on your side of the line,” Loki says. “You smell.”

Thor is quiet again, and doesn’t move.

“I’m gonna tell you,” Thor says, “and if you don’t like what I say, then...I’ll go back on my side, ok? But… I hope you like it. I think you might.”

“What are you going on about?”

He hears Thor blow out a shaky breath.

“You. I dreamed about you.”

Loki feels like all the air just got sucked out of his lungs. He can’t talk or move or do anything other than try to breathe through the constriction in his chest. Seven flowers to dream about your true love, and he dreamed about Thor, and Thor dreamed about him. His brother.

“Ok,” Thor says after a minute. “I’m sorry, I thought...I’m sorry…” He’s mumbling more sorries and trying to disentangle himself from the sheets and get up, and Loki rolls over, a little frantic, and grabs him.

“I dreamed about you too,” Loki manages to get out.

All the tension in Thor’s body instantly melts and his shoulders sag.

“Oh thank god.”

Thor flops back down next to him and they’re facing each other on their sides, and Loki’s heart is beating so fast he thinks it might rabbit right out of his throat.

Thor is smiling, so wide and sunny, the smile that Loki loves so much. He loves his brother so much. He doesn’t know what to say or do. I want Thor to kiss me, he thinks again, I want Thor to kiss me, I want—

Thor kisses him.

*

Frigga’s footsteps on the stairs have them springing apart ten minutes later, Thor scrambling over to his own bed just in time for them both to close their eyes before the door opens.

“Rise and shine, my sweet sloths,” Frigga says, throwing the curtain open. “It’s noon.”

Loki looks over at Thor behind their mom’s back and Thor pats the blanket over his groin.

“We’re up,” Thor says.

Loki has to bite his pillow to keep from laughing.

*

A little while later in the kitchen while Frigga is making them sandwiches and iced tea, Thor nudges Loki’s foot under the table.

“Hey, Mom,” Thor says. “I know I already sent in my school acceptance, but I was wondering if you’d mind if I requested a transfer.”

“What were you thinking of, darling?”

Thor is looking at Loki with a half-smile that it’s clear he’s struggling to contain from exploding across his face, and Loki can’t look away. He covers Thor’s foot with his own.

“I want to go where Loki’s going.”


End file.
